32 Anons arrested in Turkey after government website attacks

32 Anonymous hacktivists have been arrested in Turkey after distributed denial …

Turkish police have detained 32 people, five of them under 18, on suspicion of involvement in Anonymous-led distributed denial of service attacks against Turkish government websites. Sites taken down include Turkey's Telecommunications Presidency and the Ministry of Labor.

The DDoS attacks were a response to plans by Turkey's Information and Communications Technologies Authority (BTK) to implement a Web censoring system starting August 22. The country is already no stranger to such censorship, and in the past has demanded ISPs block access to sites such as YouTube, often for prolonged periods, due to real or perceived breaches of Turkish law. Anonymous believes that the filters will allow the government to go further, and record and monitor the activity of citizens, allowing the intervention and disruption of political protest and dissent.

The arrests were made in 12 cities around Turkey. Of the 32 arrested, 13 were claimed by Turkish police to be planning an attack on the site of the Supreme Election Board (YSK), to coincide with the publication of the results of yesterday's election. The response of the Turkish authorities seems remarkably swift, with arrests coming just days after the original attacks. This may be a result of Anonymous' widespread use of the LOIC denial of service tool, which offers no anonymity or identity masking; the only protection it offers is sheer weight of numbers, and the hope that if thousands of people are attacking a site then law enforcement agencies won't single out any individuals.

These latest arrests come just days after Spanish authorities arrested three Anonymous hacktivists in response to attacks on banking and government websites. AnonOps responded almost immediately with a DDoS attack on the site of the National Police, taking it offline for an hour yesterday.